Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

I wriggled in my seat at the soppiness of the image, but it did clarify things for me. Before long I was even able to tell the strange story of the blacksmith’s mother who wants to know just what her son thinks he’s up to with that set of saucepans:

‘Are you copper-bottoming ‘em, my man?’

‘No. I’m aluminiuming ‘em, mum.’

I was able to say: the seething sea ceaseth, and thus sufficeth us, and able to imagine an imaginary menagerie manager, managing an imaginary menagerie.

But many an anemone has an enemy, and her enemy was pace.

‘This is not a fifty-yard dash, my dear. I want you to love every single movement of your tongue and lips and teeth. Every single movement of your tongue and lips and teeth. What is it that I want you to love?’

‘Ev-ery single movement of my tongue and lips and teeth.’

‘Ev’ry, dear, not ev-ery. We do not wish, after all, to sound foreign. But you said there “tongue and lips and teeth”. A few weeks ago you would have said “tung-nips-n-teeth”, wouldn’t you?’

I nodded.

‘And now you know our wonderful secret. How beautiful it is to hear every single movement of your tongue and lips and teeth.’

We moved on from John Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’ to Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Blow Bugle Blow’ and within a term I was comprehensible to all. Like those foreigners in adventure stories who would come out with Caramba! Zut! and Himmel! when excited, I was still likely to revert to rushing streams of Stephenese at moments of high passion, but essentially I was cured. But something wonderful and new had happened to me, something much more glorious than simply being understood. I had discovered the beauty of speech. Suddenly I had an endless supply of toys: words. Meaningless phatic utterance for its own sake would become my equivalent of a Winnie the Pooh hum, my music. In the holidays I would torment my poor mother for hours in the car by saying over and over again ‘My name is Gwendoline Bruce Snetterton.

Gwendoline Bruce Snetterton. Snetterton. Snetterton. Snetterton.’ Ignoring the gender implications of such a name choice, which are not our concern just now, these were the only songs that I could sing. It was the journey from consonant to vowel, the tripping rhythm, the texture that delighted me. As others get tunes on their brain, I get words or phrases on the brain. I will awaken, for example, with the sentence, ‘Hoversmack tender estimate’ on my lips. I will say it in the shower, while I wait for the kettle to boil, and as I open the morning post. Sometimes it will be with me all day.

I was immensely put out, incidentally, when a few years later Monty Python used the name Vince Snetterton in one of their sketches. Snetterton is a village in Norfolk, and I felt that they had stolen it from me. From that day forward, Gwendoline Bruce Snetterton ceased to be.

Language was something more than power then, it was more than my only resource in a world of tribal shouts and athleticism and them, the swimmers and singers, it was also a private gem collection, a sweet shop, a treasure chest.

But in a culture like ours, language is exclusive, not inclusive. Those on easy terms with words are distrusted. I was always encouraged to believe that cleverness and elegance with words obscured and twisted decent truth: Britain’s idea of a golden mean was (and still is) healthy inarticulacy. Mean, certainly – but golden? Leaden, I think. To the healthy English mind (a phenomenon we will dwell on later) there is something intellectually spivvy, something flash, something jewy about verbal facility. George Steiner, Jonathan Miller, Frederic Raphael, Will Self, Ben

Elton even…, how often that damning word clever is attached to them, hurled at them like an inky dart by the snowy-haired, lobster-faced, Garrick Club buffoons of the Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator.

As usual, I scamper ahead of myself.

When I was a prep-school master at Cundall Manor School in North Yorkshire, eleven or twelve years after arriving at Stouts Hill (note the dashing blazer in the photograph and wonder that this man was allowed to live) the boys at my breakfast table liked me to tell them over and over again the story of Bunce and the Village Shop. I think it gave them a kick to know that a teacher could once have been Bad – not just naughty, but Bad, really Bad.

Discipline at Stouts Hill, for all that I have correctly described the place as familial, friendly and warm, was tough, or what would be called tough today. It centred more or less entirely around the cane: the whack as it was called by masters, matrons and boys.

‘You get caught doing that, you’ll get the whack a friend might say with lip-smacking relish.

‘Right, Fry, if- you’re not in bed in ten seconds flat, it’ll be the whack for you,’ the master-on-duty would warn.

‘How many times have you had the whack this week, Fry?’ I would be asked in wonderment.

The headmaster when I arrived at Stouts Hill was still the school’s founder, Robert Angus. He kept a collection of whippy bamboo canes behind the shutters of his study and they were used with great regularity, most especially during the feared Health Week, a time when he made it plain that his arms and shoulders craved exercise and would look for the slenderest excuses to find it. During Health Week an infraction of the rules that would usually have resulted in lines or detention would be upgraded to the whack. A crime ordinarily punishable by three strokes would be dealt with by six, and so on.

If Health Week was to be feared, far more terrifying were those occasions when Angus was unwell or away and the deputy headmaster, Mid Kemp, took over the running of the school and the administration of physical punishment.

Mid, I was disconsolate to find out while researching for this book, was short for Middleton. I had spent the whole of my life up until now convinced that it was an abbreviation for Midfred, which would have suited the man better.

In my memory Mid Kemp’s hands, his patched tweed jackets, his moustache and his hair were all yellowed with nicotine. I don’t know what it is about modern cigarettes, but no longer does one see the great stained smoking fingers and egg-yolk streaked white hair of old. Mid Kemp looked and talked like C. Aubrey Smith in The Four Feathers. His favourite word, one for which I have a great deal of time myself as a matter of fact, was Arse. Everyone was more or less an arse most of the time, but I was arsier than just about everyone else in the school. In fact, in my case he would often go further – I was on many occasions a bumptious arse. Before I learned what bumptious actually meant I assumed that it derived from ‘bum’ and believed therefore with great pride that as a bumptious arse I was doubly arsey – twice the arse of ordinary arses.

When umpiring cricket matches, Mid Kemp treated his own arse to the bracing leather comforts of a shooting stick and would perch at square leg in a yellow haze of nicotine that spread from short midwicket to deep fine leg.

Mid Kemp treated boys’ arses, on those occasions when Angus was away, to the most ferocious cuts of the cane. Instead of the straightforward thwack, his speciality was the bacon-slicer, a vertical downwards slash requiring far less effort and inflicting infinitely more pain than the conventional horizontal swat.

Early in my time at Stouts Hill he was replaced as deputy headmaster by Angus’s son-in-law, A. J. Cromie, an alumnus of Trinity College Dublin who bore a ferocious moustache and terrified me more than he could ever have known. Cromie drove a spectacularly beautiful blue Rolls Royce, wore (in my memory at least) green Irish thornproof tweeds and taught me French in an accent which, young as I may have been, I suspected to be far from authentically Gallic.